‘But it’s a great feeling of exhilaration and accomplishment once you get up there.’

Until last February, most of Jim Sterrett’s vacations were spent on a beach somewhere in Mexico or Hawaii. His outlook on vacations didn’t change until his friend and law partner, Dan Minteer, proposed an adventure: climb Mt. Kilimanjaro. With the prospect of a vacation they “could talk about for 20 years,” Sterrett, Minteer and another lawyer mapped out plans to climb the tallest mountain in Africa. Aside from a daily regimen of jogging in the hills of Presidio Park near his home, the 40-year-old Sterrett does not consider himself an athlete. A skiing accident last year left him in a wheelchair with several destroyed leg ligaments and a broken kneecap. He wasn’t walking until six months before his climb. Sterrett has been a corporate lawyer and partner at the law firm of Lillick McHose & Charles since 1983. On the coffee table in his office on the 18th floor of the Wells Fargo Building is a thick album filled with photographs that chronicled the 19,340-foot ascent of the peak in Tanzania. Times staff writer Caroline Lemke interviewed him and Barbara Martin photographed him at his office.

This just sounded like something absolutely out of the ordinary. It’s a part of the world I would never go to. I had never climbed a mountain before. It just sounded like a lot of fun. It’s the sense of the unknown.

It’s a four-day climb. There is no technical assistance in terms of ropes or anything like that. It’s all hands and feet. You start at about 5,000 feet, which would be about the height of Denver. It’s a huge rain forest jungle. There are monkeys all around, and it’s very hot, very moist. After the first day, we stayed at this little camp at about 10,000 feet.

An hour or two out of there, you go from what’s called jungle, basically, to what they call alpine meadows. The vegetation is remarkably similar to Southern California, except some of the plants you simply don’t find here. Then, you climb another day to about 12,000 or 13,000 feet, spend the night, go up the next day to just under the peak of the mountain, at about 15,000 feet.

The last leg of the journey is pretty arduous. On the peak, the winds are so high and some of the footing so treacherous that you would be afraid of falling 500 feet. You’re going straight uphill, and there’s very little oxygen.

The last part of the climb you get up at midnight, climb from 1 o’clock in the morning until around daybreak. So, you’re climbing in pitch black, especially after the moon goes down. It goes behind the mountain and you really can’t see much except for 5 or 10 feet.

The idea is to get there just as the sun comes up. Unfortunately, we got up about an hour and a half too early. Our guide and another guide with this group from Germany kind of got into a sprint race. So, we got there an hour and a half too early.

At the top of the mountain, it was freezing, absolutely freezing. At the base of the mountain, it’s so hot and muggy. Four days later, you wind up on the top of this mountain and it’s freezing. You have to prepare for that. We only stayed up on the top for about an hour because the winds were so hard and the sunlight is so bright. But it’s a great feeling of exhilaration and accomplishment once you get up there.

It takes two days to get back down after it takes four days to get up. It was a race, an absolute race. Everyone is so happy that they made it to the top, and it’s so exhilarating to go downhill instead of uphill, people get into mad-dash races. It’s not something that a lawyer in San Diego normally experiences.

It’s fun in every way. One forgets just how convenient our life is, and when you go off on a climb like that, it’s a different altitude, different food, culture and all of the things we rely on for every day.

It certainly perked up my interest for doing this sort of thing again. My late-night reading is full of adventure travel books, trying to figure out where I want to spend my three weeks next year.